​Military ‘mask’: British Army gets ‘information warfare’ focus, says top general

The British Army is adopting a new mode of psychological warfare for the information age, inspired by the Russian concept of ‘maskirovka’, meaning military deception, according to a top UK general.

Under its new doctrine,
dubbed “integrated action,” hard power would feature
much less, while strategists and tacticians conceive of allies
and enemies as “audiences” to be influenced by other
means.

Speaking at Chatham House on Monday, General Sir Nicholas Carter
gave the example of the 77th Brigade, a new unit formed in
January with the purpose of fighting psychological warfare
through communication channels such as social media.

Carter, who is head of the British Army, said the new doctrine
was part of a wider shift toward a policy of “persistent
engagement overseas,” where British troops are continuously
engaged in military operations abroad.

Integrated action recognizes that the “character of
conflict” has changed in the information age, he said.

“Maneuver is now multidimensional. It started being
two-dimensional with fire and movement. We introduced a third
dimension with air and artillery. We moved through maneuver in
the electromagnetic spectrum and we now find ourselves in an era
of information maneuver.”

Carter said he views global affairs as being in a state of
“constant competition,” adding that the new doctrine
plays into this.

He pointed to his Russian counterpart General Valery Gerasimov’s
espousal of ‘maskirovka’ as a pattern for future conflict.

Joergen Oerstroem Moeller, a Danish academic and foreign policy
expert, defined maskirovka as: “Deliberately misleading the
enemy with regard to [one’s] own intentions causing the opponent
to make wrong decisions, thereby playing into your own
hand.”

It was successfully employed by the Soviet Union to confuse the
German high command in the later stages of World War II.

Writing in the Huffington Post last year, Moeller said today
maskirovka is “mainly done through cunning use of networks to
shape perceptions blurring the picture and opening up for world
opinion to see your view as the correct one legitimizing policy
steps you intend to take.”

Carter said the British Army’s new doctrine of warfare will
combine hard power with soft power, with an emphasis on
communications and new media. At the tactical level, it will also
involve thinking “laterally” about how to engage
adversaries, he said.

The newly-formed 77th Brigade was cited as an example of the
direction the British Army will go.

Due to be formally created in April, the new brigade is named in
tribute to the Chindits, a Second World War British guerrilla
force which used unorthodox tactics to confuse the Japanese army
in Burma.

Soldiers with journalism and social media skills are among those
being sought, as the new unit will be tasked with engaging in
psychological warfare via Facebook, Twitter and other online
media.

Colonel Richard Kemp criticized the move, warning the new
operation should not mean fewer troops on the frontline at a time
when the British armed forces have already been cut back.

“My view is that this should not be done at the expense of
combat troops,” he said.

Carter said the new doctrine of integrated engagement comes
within a wider shift towards a policy of “persistent
engagement overseas.”